I have been asked on several
occasions why I am looking at New Brunswick as the place I would like to start
my business. A simple answer is why not New Brunswick? However there is much
more behind my reasoning than that. To begin with, look at the population
density of New Brunswick on the map at right as compared to the map for all
of Canada above:

While not nearly as dense
as the Toronto to Montreal corridor, relative to the distribution in the rest
of the country, the rural population is significant. In Canada as a whole,
population tends to be concentrated in urban centers. Land use in New Brunswick
is quite different. Despite the urban centres, there is a large rural population
in the province, which could translate into a reasonable market for the services
I am interested in providing.

By contrast, other forestry
oriented areas such as northern Ontario, northern Quebec, and most of British
Columbia, have very little population on the land. The rural populations of
southern Ontario and Quebec are large as well, but forestry is declining as
a portion of their local economies these days. What demand there is appears
to be already well served by a large number of nurseries, while the Atlantic
provinces have fewer (see map at right).

Most of the nurseries that
there are in the Atlantic region are large scale industrial nurseries, producing
a limited number of commercial species for planting in intensively managed
industrial forests. That is not a market sector I'm targeting. In fact the
only native plant nurseries which I have located in the region are The
Acadian Forest Restoration Nursery in New Brunswick, and The
MacPhail Woods Native Tree and Shrub Nursery in Prince Edward Island.